Fuel-stacking behaviour among households in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

In: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:ltu:diva-86889

Abstract

In many developing countries, modern energy sources are seen not only as cleaner and more efficient than traditional fuels, but also important for achieving socio-economic development in the country. Hence, from an energy policy perspective, households should switch towards modern energy sources use. However, despite the availability of modern energy sources in the city of Dar es Salaam, many households continue to use traditional fuels for cooking, often in combination with their modern counterparts. Therefore, this study contributes to the existing literature by describing and analysing this so-called energy mix in the city as well as the effects of households' experience with using various fuels. A comparison of multinomial logitspecifications yielded different results, which implies that the analysis of the energy mix is sensitive to the way households are categorised in the research; households are much more likely to shift most of their energy use to new fuel types in response to changing conditions than to shift all of it. The results also show that households' fuel choices were sensitive to their fueluse experience. Both findings have implications for energy policy; achieving shifts to new fuel types is easier if the goal is to achieve widespread, rather than total, shifts in household energy use, and achieving shifts to new fuels is easier if households have had at least some prior experience with those fuels.